


Clear as a Cup of Water

by writersstareoutwindows



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post-The Eleventh Hour, just some small slice of life fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 02:05:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10401309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writersstareoutwindows/pseuds/writersstareoutwindows
Summary: Ren, and June, and seven years inside a bubble.





	

Ren missed the sky.

That was her first thought as she looked through the window that first morning. She missed the blue, blue, blue sky, clear as a cup of water. But all she saw was the familiar, muffled white-pastel of the bubble.

But June had come home. The spell was undone, Roswell and the three adventurers had led the monster away, Refuge was safe. Why were they still trapped? Why couldn’t she see the sky?

And there was June herself, already sitting at the counter, though Ren had only just opened. She held a handful of diamonds.

“Can I have breakfast?” she asked quietly.

Ren was wiping glasses mechanically as she stared through the window, and so did not hear her right away. Eventually, Ren started and said, “What, yes, of course, of course.”

She refused the diamonds flatly. Flapjacks, eggs, bacon, strawberries with cream–Ren piled food at June’s place until it was all fit to topple over. Only after June had eaten her way through a stack and a half did Ren ask, almost absently, “Is that bubble gonna come down?”

June glanced through the window over her shoulder. Meeting Ren’s eyes, she just said, “Not today.”

She came in again on the second morning while Ren was measuring her windows. The earthquake had shattered the glass, so she needed to fit them with new panes.

She had paused to lean through the opening. Despite attempts to ignore it, her eyes had strayed to the sky.

June spoke behind her. “Good morning, Ren.”

Ren reeled away from the window. “Mornin’, June!”

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” June laughed. “Do you have any more flapjacks?”

"Give me a hot minute and you’ll have a plateful–put those diamonds away, you can pay for anything else, but you’ve earned a lifetime of free breakfast.”

She joined June with her own towering stack minutes later. The two started to talk and laugh, and by the end Ren found herself lost in thought as she stared at the bubbles in her glass of milk.

“June,” she said, “will the bubble ever come down?”

June did not look so young as she considered the answer. At length she shrugged and said, “Not today.”

June kept coming for breakfast, so Ren kept asking. Every morning, they looked out the window together, and her answer was the same: “Not today.”

After a week, Ren learned that June liked chocolate chips in her flapjacks. After two, she asked if June wouldn’t like to stay over at the Davy Lamp, even just on weekends. She had noticed how Isaak paced around outside while they ate, and how June set her shoulders when she spoke to him. He was too nervous and she was too damaged for the arrangement to work.

After a month, June moved her entire self into the upper room. Now Ren could hear her answer before she even started a morning fire: “Not today.”

After two years, she stopped asking; she didn’t need to. June gave the same answer, every morning, without needing to be asked.

On one of these days, they visited the ever-unfinished clay statues beside the bubble’s edge. June swore up and down that she’d spotted Roswell, but all Ren noticed were children playing, throwing mud balls, mimicking the slow-moving poses of the three adventurers just beyond reach.

Ren eyed Taako. His bored expression had been changing ever slightly to surprise, even awe. She mimed tipping a hat to him, while behind her, June told a kid working on the statues that Magnus actually had a scar over one eye, you just couldn’t make it out through the bubble. A little red bird alighted on Merle’s clay-wood arm while she added it.

They spent the first Candlenights alone together in the Davy Lamp. Ren closed early because she knew she was going to start crying. When was the last time Refuge celebrated Candlenights, really? How many would they spend inside the bubble?

It wasn’t very hard for Ren to conjure a decorative bush for the holiday. When she came downstairs with it, she really couldn’t help crying.

June had covered the Davy Lamp in hundreds of candles. They burned in shifting shades of gold, silver, and blue, lighting on two boxes that they’d wrapped in sparkly paper together. June stood in the middle of the bar, worrying her fingers.

“Do you like it?”

Ren dropped the bush so that she could lift June with the strength of her hug.

They spent the second Candlenights at Paloma’s, because she had promised to make chocolate chip scones. She even had strawberries and cream for Ren. In return, she and June had made her a big, thick shawl, using the knitting skills Luca and Redmond had taught them.

It wasn’t until the fifth Candlenights that Isaak was allowed to celebrate with them. He gave June a small gold junebug pin. They didn’t say much to each other.

Seven years of birthdays did manage to slip by quite quietly. June didn’t like to celebrate. One year, Ren had made a cake, which June tried to eat because Ren had worked so hard on it. But she saw her outside later, feeding it crumb by crumb to a little red bird. After that, the only concession they made to June’s birthday was to put a candle in her flapjacks that morning.

“Not today,” she said, before blowing it out.

Seven years of that, and Ren almost stopped noticing. The sky was just the sky, muffled white-pastel. It didn’t seem to matter so much. There was always music and flirty fun at the Davy Lamp. There was always the need to keep a handle on a tipsy crowd, plan for a midsummer festival that always seemed just around the corner, come up with new recipes for breakfast with June. And there was June, who needed food, and clothes, and advice, who was helping run the bar, was learning magic, was becoming something of a baker.

Ren was so caught up in living that she didn’t even visit the three adventurers at the edge of town anymore. Some nights, though, she had to go looking for June, only to find her sitting at Magnus’s red clay feet, observing the real adventurers outside the bubble.

There came a morning when Ren woke late. She needed to get more chocolate chips for June. That was her first thought as she began to sit up.

There was June already, sitting on the side of her bed. Her knees were pulled up to her chin. Ren instinctively wrapped an arm around her.

“Good mornin’, Junebug,” she said sleepily.

June’s face was as bright as the sky outside.

“It’s today,” she said.

The blue, blue, blue sky outside, clear as a cup of water.


End file.
